Sheepish Decisions

Trends attract people. Like an industry or location-contained virus, they work their way through a certain cohort of individuals, infiltrating their minds and influencing their decisions for better or worse. Whether it’s wearing sneakers with your tailored suit, using a standing desk at the office or playing Pokemon Go, its sheer presence forces us to at least consider hopping on the bandwagon. The same holds true for trends in the world of business.

In recent years, there has been a magnifying glass placed on the approach businesses take to corporate learning. The tool that has stolen the spotlight and the attention of many L&D departments is known as the “LMS” or Learning Management System. If you’re 73% of companies today, you know what I’m talking about because you’re already using one. Well, your company has at least paid for one, whether you use it on a daily basis is another conversation entirely.

The reality is that these systems, while immensely popular, remain slow, lack the tools to increase employee capability and are not very user friendly. With all the wasted learning that is taking place due to the LMS, it begs the question: Is this really the best tool to help our business move the needle in the right direction?

To give an informed response to this questions, you’ve got to look at the demographic and issue that the LMS was initially created to solve.

The LMS was created as an online learning portal that University’s leveraged as a solution to provide distance education to students and a more immersive virtual classroom experience. As a solution for students whose primary concern was to stay on top of their studies and devoted most of their time to learning, the LMS made sense.

But the world of business is quite different from the world of academics. Employees don’t have multiple hours in the day to spend on an LMS reading massive documents and completing compliance training, they have other responsibilities. Moreover, an employee’s tenure with a company typically outlasts that of a student’s 4 month semester. There is no definitive start and finish to corporate learning; business requirements change, learning priority’s shift and employees must keep on top of this to have the knowledge they need to perform at their best.

Simply put, the LMS was built for higher education, not business. That’s why it doesn’t work in a corporate setting. Don’t spend money trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.

Before making a decision to overhaul your organization’s approach to learning, consider the 3 fundamental Flaws with Learning Management Systems that will cause you to rethink the LMS.

Flaw #1: The LMS assumes that learning ends after a module is completed

Most companies use the LMS to push out large volumes of information to workers, similar to how schools push out classroom resources to students. The LMS (in an academic model) assumes that learning “ends”, while in real life people forget what they’ve learned and require continued reinforcement and support. Employees can’t just be expected to read something and remember it forever, the brain doesn’t work like that. The reality is that employees need ongoing reinforcement of that training to remember what they learn.

Flaw #2: The LMS doesn’t measure thing business leaders find valuable

Logins, course completions, time-spent and test scores/grades. These are the typical things that your LMS will measure. But are these metrics really an indication of how well your employees are functioning within their roles? Just because an employee has a passing grade on a test, does that tell their manger that they can effectively communicate the features and benefits of their products 6 months down the road? Business leaders need a tool that provides higher order measurements so they can track things like knowledge improvement and retention, allowing them to correlate the metrics with safety incidents, customer satisfaction or sales levels.

Flaw #3: The LMS isn’t really mobile

While virtually all LMS’s are available on a mobile device, they were not built to be used that way. Imagine spending two hours on your phone clicking through slides, followed by a long video, and finally a quiz. This is a traditional classroom experience, jammed onto a mobile device. Sure, learners can access their LMS anywhere and anytime, but why would they want to? Employees today need to be very effective at managing their time, and scrolling through a training module on their phone for 90+ minutes each day just isn’t feasible.

It’s quite easy to get caught up in the hoopla of trends that are occurring in today’s fast paced world. But it never hurts to stop for a moment and think “Am I making the best decision, or the popular one?”. That simple consideration might just help stop you from jumping on a bandwagon you’ve got no business being on. Stay ahead of the market, don’t follow the herd.